Spring 2001 Hudson (Show)Room

Jessica Bronson

About the artist

Jessica Bronson studied biochemistry at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque and received her MFA at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, LosRead more

About the exhibition

Jessica Bronson’s video installations capture the ephemeral phenomena of the everyday and reorder it into extraordinary proportions. An extensive knowledge of film informs the artist’s work, as does an engagement with natural and mediated experience. Using original and stock film footage, Bronson’s manipulations of image, time and sound tend to mesmerize and sharpen the senses at the same time. Alluding to the conventional notions of the sublime and to several film genres westerns, documentaries, and science fiction films Panamint Tilt evokes the utopian ideal of the West and its unsettling yet persistent relationship to technology.

Panamint Tilt is comprised of several parts. The title piece is a wandering surveillance of the California desert near the Panamint Mountains magnified into two, large-scale projections. Distorted by the use of a wide-angle lens, the landscape is doubled, flipped and reversed into two mirror images that together form moving patterns of color and form. Another element, a monitor diptych entitled doubled sunset, includes alternate imagery from the same landscape, but fractures it into kaleidoscopic proportions. Each work has a distinct electronic soundtrack that creates a symphonic and random arrangement of abstract sounds. Each work may be somewhat disorienting in its complexity yet is simultaneously calming in movement, which is set to the pace of regular breathing. Finally, three light-jet prints (harmony, where about, and badwater) accompany the exhibition and act as doppelgangers of the strange desertscape in the video works.